Overall, our whole China trip was a fantastic experience. I am pleased to offer the comments below and I have attached some pictures. Please feel free to use us as a reference for Travel China Guide, and please let me know if you would like any other information from us.

The food at the meals arranged for us ranged from adequate to excellent, and there was always a very large quantity of food. The A La Carte meals were very good and it was fun to choose our dishes. The restaurants in Lijiang were especially good.

We had six guides, one in each city, and all of them were very conscientious, knowledgeable, and helpful. We were always greeted warmly when we arrived in each city, even by Lily in Xian when we arrived late at night due to a weather-related delay in our flight. Our guide in Beijing was very helpful in talking to our daughter and giving her directions as to where to meet us, as our daughter was dividing her time in Beijing between packing up her dorm room at her school and spending time with us. However, we were disappointed with our Beijing guide during our visit to the Great Wall. She did not give us any background information on the Great Wall at all, but simply told us to meet us two hours after we were dropped off. We enjoyed hiking the wall on our own, but expected some information beforehand.

Our guide, Lily, in Xian, had a fantastic knowledge of history which she was glad to share with us. She gave us a very complete tour of the museum in Xian which was extremely interesting.

All of the guides had very good to excellent English skills except our guide in Lijiang, whose English was a little weak. In particular, Felicity in Kunming spoke English extremely well and was very outgoing and enthusiastic. Tanya in Shanghai spoke English almost like a U.S. native, which was amazing to us, since she had never visited an English-speaking country. She also has a fantastic personality.

All of the guides were very knowledgeable about the places we visited. As mentioned above, Lily in Xian had an especially extensive knowledge of Chinese history.

All of the drivers were very professional, competent, and nice people. The cars were all extremely clean and well maintained. We were picked up at each site as soon as we were done touring, so that we did not need to waste time waiting for the drivers.

Mr. Fong, our driver in Beijing and the Great Wall, was especially personable and my daughter, who speaks Chinese, enjoyed talking to him. Our most memorable driver was Mr. Yong, in Dali and Lijiang. The roads between and around these cities are very mountainous and winding and can be treacherous. Mr. Yong is an excellent and very professional driver and we felt very safe with him. He also is a very nice person who has had many interesting life experiences and my daughter had a lot of fun talking with him in Chinese.

General comments:

Overall, our tour with Travel China Guide greatly exceeded our expectations. We took a private tour of Beijing, Xian, Kunming, Dali, Lijiang, and Shanghai, and our group consisted of my husband, my 20 year old daughter, and me. Our daughter is studying Chinese in college and studied abroad in Beijing this semester. We met her at the end of her semester in December to begin our tour. We normally travel independently but felt that our tour of China would be too complicated to plan and carry out on our own. We greatly enjoyed our experiences on the tour. All of the sights and shows on the planned itinerary were worthwhile. We did not feel at all rushed by our tour guides and we had sufficient time to see the sights. If we wished to wander off the standard path to see something that caught our attention, the guides were more than glad to do this.

Since our tour was a private tour, we were very pleased that we had great flexibility to modify our itinerary as we wished, both before the tour and during the tour. Our daughter did not join us until the last day of our tour in Beijing, as she was finishing her exams and packing, and we received a refund to compensate for this. We added an extra day in Lijiang and also added taking the cable car at Jade Dragon Snow Mountain near Lijiang to our itinerary. We added a free day in Shanghai at the end of our tour so that my husband could meet with his business colleagues there, and also opted to return to Beijing by train instead of by plane.

I exchanged many emails with Frieda and Hebe at Travel China Guide while I was planning my tour. They always answered very promptly and gave very complete and helpful answers to even the most minor questions that I had. We were glad that it was possible for all three of us to share a room, with an extra bed for our daughter in each hotel, instead of requiring us to pay for an additional room for her. Frieda and Hebe also wisely recommended that we buy four train tickets instead of three, since the train compartments have four beds, so we could have privacy and adequate room for our luggage. I was very happy to meet Frieda while we had lunch in Xian, and she gave us a little gift from Travel China Guide.

The guides were also very flexible during the tours, since it was a private tour. For example, we were able to leave our hotel in Xian early on our departure day and rent bicycles to cycle around the city wall, which we greatly enjoyed. We also had time to add a visit to the 88th floor observatory in Shanghai to our itinerary, which was not in the original plan. We had requested "no shopping stop" but were taken to some factories, including silk, jade, and embroidery. We enjoyed the demonstrations of how the items were made, and were not pressured to purchase anything.

We would like to compliment all of the guides, as they were all excellent. Besides showing us the sights, we learned a lot about China from talking to them about their lives. Juliet in Beijing was very helpful and did not get flustered by all of our confusing arrangements with our daughter's comings and goings. Lily in Xian has a strong command of Chinese history and an exceptional ability to convey it to others. Felicity in Kunming is an extremely friendly, well-spoken, and competent person. Coco in Dali is a great guide and it was very interesting to meet someone from the Bai community native to that city. Ferren in Lijiang went above and beyond the call of duty to show us his city and assist us in every possible way. He is truly a gentleman. Tanya in Shanghai has a great personality, nearly native-speaking English, and is very proud of her native city. We enjoyed meeting all of them.

Before our trip, I was somewhat worried about the weather while traveling in China in December, but it turned out to be the perfect time to go and I would recommend traveling at this time. In Beijing and Xian, the weather was similar to New York or Philadelphia, which was fine for us, while in Yunnan Province (Kunming, Dali, Lijiang), the weather was clear and spring-like. According to climate information, December has the least precipitation of any month, so we were able to enjoy the clear skies and beautiful views in Yunnan, which would not have been possible during rainier seasons. Also, although we saw many Chinese tour groups during our tour, we were told that all of the sights are much more crowded during peak season, while it was relatively uncrowded while we visited.

The hotels on the tour were generally very good to excellent, with the exception of the Asia Star Hotel in Dali. The Asia Star Hotel had a good location near the old city and beautiful views of the lake from our room, but there was no heat in the room, only a partial role of toilet tissue, and the breakfast buffet was not nearly as good as at the other hotels. The hotels in Lijiang, Kunming, and Shanghai had excellent locations near the city centers. The hotel in Beijing was a fine hotel, but was quite far from the area of Beijing where the touring sights are found, which made it somewhat inconvenient and time consuming to get to the sights.

Please note -
The only problem we encountered came at the end of the trip. We had been told prior to our tour that our train from Shanghai to Beijing would depart at 9:20 PM, when the actual time was 7:20 PM. We believe that this misunderstanding was due to an error in translating "19:20" in 24 hour time to 12 hour AM/PM time. My husband had planned to spend the extra two hours with his business colleagues in Shanghai, so this small misunderstanding did create a slight problem for us. We suggest that you make sure all the people who answer the phone at Travel China Guide know how to convert times correctly.

Thank you again!
Gloria, Ray, and Laura Post